Cartoon Museum Comes to Empire State Building

The L.A. Times reports that the National Cartoon Museum has taken up a 14,000-square-foot, three-story space at the bottom of the Empire State Building.

“The space is street level,” says Brian Walker, a curatorial advisor to the project and a co-curator of the “Masters of American Comics” show on view here at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the UCLA Hammer Museum. “It’s not like you take this elevator up and then have to search around for it. Millions of people will be walking by.”

Ralph Applebaum Associates is doing the design for the museum, which focuses on newspaper comic strips; Mr. Walker’s father drew the Beetle Bailey cartoons.

“I’ve always thought this is where the museum belonged,” he says. “I’ve thought that from the beginning. This is the capital of cartooning, from the New Yorker to comics publishers. It sort of begins and ends in New York City.”

For now, according to the Museum’s Web site, “our collections are being housed at an atmospherically controlled secure storage facility located in Stamford, Connecticut.”